Dick Lugar: “my amendment is based upon S. 313, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act of 2005, which I first offered in…”

“my amendment is based upon S. 313, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act of 2005, which I first offered in November 2004 and reintroduced this January. It is focused on facilitating implementation of the program and removing some of the self-imposed restrictions that complicate or delay the destruction of weapons of mass destruction. By self-imposed, I mean restrictions imposed by our Government on our programs which bring about delay, sometimes very severe delay, at a time that we take seriously the war on terrorism, and the need, as a matter of fact, to bring under control materials and weapons of mass destruction as rapidly and as certainly as possible. In essence, I am going to argue in various forms during the next few minutes that the United States of America, contrary to almost all common sense, imposes upon itself the need to examine year by year specifically Russian cooperation, Russian money, whether moneys are fungible; that is, moneys that are spent by the United States to work with Russians to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Russia and elsewhere, whether we are, in fact, serious about this. If we came to a conclusion that for some reason the Russians had not spent precisely the amount of money that we think they ought to spend, does any Senator believe we at that point should stop taking warheads off of missiles, should stop trying to get control of weapons of mass destruction in the chemical and biological areas? Of course not.…”